


Chosen

by genarti



Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Gen, creepiness, dark interpretation of canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bendis was ten the year that his neighbor Lydia Turner got taken by the Heralds.</p><p>(Warning: this is an interpretation of canon that may stomp on your preteen years with big steel-toed boots, if your preteen years were as full of YAY SPARKLY TELEPATHIC HORSIES as mine.  Contains minimal violence and no sex, but a certain amount of implied mind-bond creepiness.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chosen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isabeau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isabeau/gifts).



> You asked about a dark interpretation of Valdemar, and I found I couldn't resist! Who knew retconning one's teenaged delights into terrible things could be such fun?

Bendis was ten the year that his neighbor Lydia Turner got taken by the Heralds.

He hadn't been there when it happened. He'd been playing with her brothers Rass and Heylar in the back alley, skimming stones at Rass's wooden hoop and the occasional rat that scuttled into view. They were lean and canny, and none of the children ever managed to hit one. The equally canny cats of the village were the only ones to manage to catch them.

When the clamor of shouts arose out in the street, Bendis and Rass shrugged at each other. Heylar, trotting over to retrieve the fallen hoop, didn't even look up. They didn't realize anything of importance had happened until Bendis's mother came out the back door with the strained look she only wore when she was trying not to seem upset.

"Ma?"

"Everything's fine, Bendis," she said, but she came over anyway to hug him. Bendis might have shot Rass a sheepish glance at this maternal affection, if she hadn't had that look on her face. Instead he stood still, and let her hug him with a desperation that made him feel cold and uncertain inside. "Why don't you come in and help with dinner? You boys go on home to your parents."

It was a candlemark still before she usually called him in. "Okay, Ma," he said.

Inside, she told him, "Lydia got herself Chosen."

"Oh," Bendis said uncertainly. Did that mean Lydia was already gone? She was a pain, and becoming more of a self-righteous know-it-all than ever now that she was a teenager, but still... "That's good, right?"

His mother made a funny sound. "Yes, Bendis," she said, but her hand tightened on his shoulder. "It's a great honor. And her family will get money -- our whole village will get money from Haven for this. You should be very proud of Lydia. Now come wash carrots for me, will you please?"

That night, his parents were unusually silent at supper. Bendis snuck glances at them, but it made him uncomfortable. Mostly he kept his head down and ate his vegetable pie as quickly as he could so he could leave the table soon.

From his bed nestled behind all the scrap wood in the back room, he heard his parents talking. Too low for him to hear, they thought, but he crept out of bed to listen near the door.

"It's an honor, poor Letitia kept saying," his father was saying, with a low savagery Bendis had rarely heard from him. "It's a damn _honor_. Hell of an honor, I say, to--"

"Karlis Borson, you shut your mouth." Bendis cringed reflexively from the scolding snap in his mother's voice, though it wasn't directed at him. "There's no cause to go saying such things."

"Heddy, you know as well as I do what kind of a job that poor child's got now."

"Yes, and that's no idea at all. We live in a safe country, all right? No civil wars here, no unrest, if there's trouble the Heralds take care of it quick as anything. Queen's justice and education for our children and food in a famine. Lydia's gone to be a part of the reason we can live like that, and her family's got two sons left, and money to start them on a good trade. Now think on that, man, and stop saying thoughtless prattle. We're a good Valdemaran household here, and I won't hear talk against the Companions under my roof. Do you mark me, Karlis? I won't hear it."

 

* * *

 

When Lydia returned for the next Midwinter holidays, she was an inch taller, dressed in Trainee grey, and riding a Companion. Its hooves were a glittering unnatural silver, and its eyes a color of blue Bendis had never seen on a living creature. He peeked out his front window when she came riding past, hoping for a glimpse of the Companion, since he'd never seen one up close. It made his stomach lurch, though, to see that shimmering gorgeous thing that looked almost like a horse and was nothing like one.

Its too-blue eye rolled towards him as Lydia trotted happily down the street, and Bendis jerked, frozen for an instant. There was no reason to fear, of course -- Companions were good, that's what everyone said, and this one had already chosen its Herald, and maybe it hadn't even seen him through the curtain -- and yet for a moment he wanted to run.

Then Lydia was slithering off its back at her house's front door, and laughing at nothing, and Bendis stole away from the window with a secret shameful relief.

Everything was worse, he found, when he tried to talk to Lydia. She was almost like she'd always been, almost the same bossy girl who seemed to think she was the older sister of the entire neighborhood. She'd gained an extra air of self-satisfaction, but that was nothing unexpected from a Lydia who'd gone off to school at Haven. Even if it _did_ make Bendis want to pitch mud pies at her head until she yelled and threw some back. He didn't do it, but he wanted to.

The bad part was when Lydia talked about Heralds, or the Collegium, or Companions, or worst of all her own Companion Elenor – and she talked about them several times an hour, it seemed. Her eyes would glaze into a blank, earnest happiness, as if she weren't hearing anything but her own words or seeing anything but blue Companion-eyes. The first time it happened, Bendis felt as if something had punched him in the stomach; it was as if Lydia had been replaced by someone else, someone who stared happily past her own brothers into something none of them could see.

All she could speak was praise. The Collegium was the best place she'd ever been; her fellow Trainees were wonderful friends, people who really understood her; she couldn't wait to earn her Whites and go on circuit and do whatever needed doing for the sake of Queen and country. And Elenor was her dearling, her joy, the most wonderful marvelous beautiful creature anyone could imagine. She spoke to Elenor sometimes into thin air, right in the middle of a conversation, or giggled when no one was around, or made faces at the walls. And that was when she wasn't spending hours with brush and currycomb.

Lydia's parents smiled at their neighbors, and smiled at their daughter, and Bendis wanted to run from the horrible pinched look of it. Rass and Heylar spent most of their time that Midwinter either holed up in their own house or playing at Bendis's, and none of them said a word about why.

That was the last Midwinter Lydia came home. She sent letters instead, always about the joys of the Collegium and what good Heralds did for the country, and at holiday times she sent apologetic notes saying that she was going to spend a few days with such-and-such Trainee friend. The Crown gave the whole village a tax break for a year, and gave Lydia coin to send home besides, which she always did with her letters. Bendis never saw any mail from Lydia himself, but he knew the contents, because Rass sometimes muttered angrily or sullenly about it when Heylar wasn't around to hear.

Heylar never spoke of his sister at all, except once, when the Garren boys from two streets over were teasing him about her. Bendis was gathering his nerve to say something when all of a sudden Heylar snapped. Bendis and the Garrens both stared in shock at the usually self-effacing Heylar, while he screamed that Heralds were what protected Valdemar, that they were just stupid envious bullies who didn't know a thing, and Lydia was luckier than any kid in this village. His face was the color of a baby's, red and blotchy and screwed up tight. Just when Bendis thought Heylar was really going to punch Poll Garren, he wheeled and fled instead. It was a full day before Bendis saw him again, and they both pretended nothing had happened.

 

* * *

 

When Bendis was thirteen, he realized that he'd spent the past year with a headache more often than not. Everything began to seem loud, as though the walls of his house had suddenly grown paper-thin and people were talking just outside. He started having occasional strange dreams, of fire and flood and arrows slamming gorily into strangers. They felt more real than any dream he'd ever had.

He didn't tell his parents, of course. What could he have told them? Dreams were dreams. If his had grown strange, if he sometimes woke choking on the memory of blood filling somebody else's lungs on the Karsite border -- well, they were still just dreams.

 

* * *

 

Bendis was fourteen, lugging a pail of water home for laundry in the early dawn light, the morning another Companion trotted into town.

It wore a saddle and halter, but had no rider. No Herald, no wounds, and no hurry. _On search_ , Bendis thought, and went cold. _On search, passing through--_

It looked at him.

No. _She_ looked at him, Herith with her glorious blue eyes, and Bendis fell into them. He dropped the bucket; he heard the distant clatter and felt the cold wetness splashing over his shoes and down his shins, but that was a dim awareness before the totality of Herith's eyes gazing into his heart.

 _:Bendis:_ , she said without words, and his heart sang and broke at once. She was too beautiful, too perfect, and the depth of love within her was endless and utterly unreachable.

 _:Bendis:_ , Herith said. _:I do not choose you:_ , and the world shattered.

It was no longer as if the walls were paper-thin; now it felt as if Bendis himself was, stretched into nothing, tiny and huddled beneath an onslaught of shouts and clamor and the impossible weight of Herith's condemnation. He could hear everything, everyone, an agonizing tumult that grew louder and louder until he couldn't bear it any longer, and still it pressed in on him, and underneath it all was the soul-tearing loss of something he'd never even had--

Something ripped apart in his mind, and he fell into merciful blackness.

 

* * *

 

It was Rass who found Bendis Borson that morning, curled up in a ball of ungainly teenaged limbs, weeping like a child. His legs were wet, presumably from the bucket that lay in a puddle of mud a few feet away, but he didn't seem to notice. Rass tried to rouse him, to ask what was wrong, but Bendis only sobbed. He didn't answer. He didn't seem even to hear, Bendis who had always been such a bright alert boy.

In the end, Rass (terrified and almost crying himself) had to haul him up and drag him to his house. Bendis stumbled with his friend's tugging, dazed and uncoordinated, still weeping.

No one ever heard another word from Bendis.

Perhaps they might have, if he hadn't drowned in the river that spring. An accident, everyone agreed, and avoided each other's eyes; a terrible accident, with the river so rain-swollen and the rocks so slippery. But perhaps Bendis wouldn't have spoken had he lived to be ninety, because for the month and a half between his unobserved accident and his death, he only rocked in a corner of his parents' house, weeping sometimes and sometimes only staring at the walls or floor, beyond them all to something no one else could see.


End file.
